Thursday Tidings

The last week or two in WoW have been fairly eventful for me, even with so many people distracted by Diablo 3. I haven’t put a ton of time into WoW, but I feel like the time I have spent has been productive and rewarding.

Podcast

First of all, I was on the Team Waffle Podcast on Friday night. We talked about the latest changes to Druids in the beta, the new talent trees and how I feel about Heroic resto raiding in Cataclysm. The podcast is now available on the Team Waffle site, or on iTunes. (I’ve also added a new page to my blog under About, with links to all the podcasts I’ve done – Jasyla Speaks.)

Raiding

After killing Heroic Madness of Deathwing 2 weeks ago, Apotheosis spent the last 2 weeks doing all the meta achievements for Glory of the Dragon Soul Raider. Now all of our raiders have shiny new Twilight Harbingers (though some of our Initiates still have an achievement or two left to get). Getting the meta achievements was a lot of fun. My favourite part was doing the red-green ooze combination on Heroic Yor’sahj – I could practically feel all the healers holding their breath as the oozes hit and our ranged dps started taking 150k Searing Blood hits. We lost a few people, but got through it without too much problem. The worst achievement, without a doubt, was Holding Hands on Hagara. We attempted this a number of times on 25 and it is just so, so buggy. Kurn meticulously placed every raider around the room so the lightning would chain properly, everyone stood where they were supposed to, and then the lightning just wouldn’t chain. It would hop from person to person and then at some point, it would just stop and refuse to hop again. We ended up doing the achievement on 10-man mode which was much easier, but it was annoying that we had to do that.

Next week we’re back to clearing heroics to get everyone all the gear they want and get as many Lifebinder’s Handmaiden and Blazing Drake mounts as we can. I really, really want a mount that looks like Alezstrasza. 🙂

Apotheosis is still recruiting, so if you are an excellent player (especially a warlock or a shadow priest) and would like to come clear Dragon Soul with us and have a great place to raid in Mists, come apply.

PVP

I’ve been doing a lot of PVP over the last few weeks. I’ve been doing the arena pass with a Rogue and shadow Priest. We were mostly doing it for the pet and title and last night we finished our 100th game. We ended the tournament with a rating of 1640 which puts us in the top 500 on the arena ladder. I’m happy with that, though 3s always make me feel a little underpowered as a Druid. Looking through the comps of all the teams in the tournament is very telling. Out of the top 2000 teams, the healer class breakdowns look like this:

511 teams have a Priest healer

456 teams have a Shaman healer

341 teams have a Pally healer

100 teams have a Druid healer

What makes it even worse is that 80% of the teams with a Resto Druid have a rating of less than 1500 (while only about 60% of the teams with any other healer are below 1500). The only thing that makes me feel good about being a Druid in the tournament is that my mana bar seems to go on forever while the other healers go oom much more quickly – 95% of the time I give my Innervate to the shadow Priest. But other than that, I feel like being a Druid is a bit of a handicap. Here’s hoping that resto PVP is in a much better place in Mists.

In other PVP news, last night I reached 1800 rating in RBGs. I’m really excited about this one. Knight-Captain Jasyla has a nice ring to it. Now I just need 24 more wins to get my Spiky Pony – I love that mount.

More Achievements!

Lastly, after months (or years) of spending time roaming around Northrend looking for rare spawns, I finally found Vyragosa and King Krush to give me the Frostbitten achievement.

Now I don’t know what I’ll do with myself when I’m waiting on arena/BG queues. Maybe fish for a sea turtle?

All the achievements from the last few weeks have put me up to 13380. I’m hoping I can get up to 13500 at least before Mists.